Christmas Special 2018
by KING FELIX
Summary: It's Christmas Time. I don't want no trouble, mister.


Christmas Special 2018

'This phantom has been put here for yourself alone. To other persons she is nothing; no more than a lay sister, or a porteress. We shall see, later, to what fantasies this leads us. And we watch her push coin to another person, and smile at him. This gives us, immediately, the key or liberty of the half-world. It is the pagan world. Besides, we have already paid a coin".

-Sacheverell Sitwell, 'Sacred and Profane Love'.

It's a strange thing, you might even say terrible, this compulsion to tell stories, relate colourful incidents. For so long it's been the main part of my life, even displacing the time it took to live through the colourful incidents to start with. That's me at the central table of a Mason-Dixon saloon, the old frontiersman aged to the point where he should have great hooded eyes like a mandarin, but instead just looks handsomely, stoopidly thoughtful.

Not to deny there were other gateway characters at other tables. Outlaw mandelbrot spokes planning almost harmless raids. Orientals trying to intrigue a person thru pretend opiates. Plenty of whores. These girls; genuinely thoughtful and lovely, to the point where a good man would feel monstrously appalled to actually take them upstairs, if only good men still existed. There's the angry, intimidatory lawmen. The weak and ineffective lawmen you just want to embarrass. But of all these colourful townsfolk, I am easily the worst. The most shameful.

Thing is, friend, I have a type of arrogance about me. It's hard to define, but there it is. Maybe the faux-eloquence masquerading as spiritual significance, where really I'm just pathetic incarnate. It'd be nice to think the newcomers see it in hindsight, all the tourist-types who sit beside me, their fascinated eyes offset by stoopid, unidentifiable accents. They listen to me tell stories. I don't particularly want to. I'd much rather interrogate them on their mysterious, decadent lives, how they can justify being away from their home towns for so long. Aren't they actually _needed_, elsewhere, the way any truly self-respecting person should be?

Instead, a little voice in my head tells me to just talk, and talk, and talk. I gauge what variety of action or intrigue my new friends might like, then just launch straight in, notwithstanding that this is the point where the shame is most overpowering. Why assume they actually care, on any meaningful level at all?

Dullards to a man, all except one. I remember he had straggly hair, like one of us. Drunk as hell but still making sense, he looked me dead in the eye and said, 'You realise, if you were trying to tell a _really_ meaningful story, it wouldn't involve shoot-outs, or show-downs, or horse-chases? It would involve the whole world feeling like a city, but you still being alone, misunderstood, forever".

I had no words. If I'd known then what I know now, I could have told him; there are no rules to what the Almighty puts in our stories. Consciousness comes from the future, a quantum bullet shot-from-the-hip in the ultimate trick-shot. If it's just the case that God is some cathartic story-teller doling meaningless sorrow, hell, that's fine by me. It just proves He's the _best_ story-teller. In the desert, you use whatever is to hand in order to survive. Which is not to there won't one day be a reckoning between us.

And it's not as if I ever get to tell my two most pivotal stories, just because ... they're too sad, too hard to draw any satisfying conclusions from. The first one is the most important to me personally, containing as it does the details of how my body got wrecked and how I lost my ability to look kindly on the world. My second most pivotal story -well, I guess it's just too abstract. I get the feeling, down in the phantom marrow of my synthetic bones, that it _means_ something, but more than that, who rightly cares? This one's on the house.

Normally, my stories would preclude any biographical data just for means of streamlining, but suffice to say, my phantom mother was the assistant to a Lutheran minister in Rapid. My phantom father was a farmer, same town. Done for by smallpox and an infected neck-wound respectively. In my middle-age, I was a ranger for the Larnrod-Pinkerton service, riding the scrubby Pelahatchie scrub and the winding rail-line which followed Pearl River.

And even then, the world didn't make a lick of sense. This was cattle-farming land; the influx of settlers on the rail-line brought a good life of industry -with saloons, card games, hoedowns, a philosophising minister in the church. It was hell illogical that anyone would want to be an outlaw. Fancy riding, fancy shooting, scrambling to make shelter: it was harder work by a factor of ten than it'd be for them to just fall in at a farm. The excitement of shoot-outs or holding some neurotic goon at gunpoint? I don't see how a person can tally that with the deeper excitement of non-resistance. Everything and everyone wants to kill you, and in the end they surely will. You need to pick fights with ideas, not farmers or fifty dollar bank vaults.

Still I tangled with my outlaw quarry with gusto, thru hell-like quarries, in churned-up desert, near cavalry forts both abandoned and working. Also, near Cataract was a bank of spikey rocks at a bigger scale than any human should have to contemplate. These rose and accumulated into vast half-mesas, one of which had been repurposed by the bandits into a bizarre encampment. The sun made any unwanted visitors crazy. The variance of fast-moving shadows -as good an ally as any gunman could ever want. The heat made the world a dark place. Gleaming flashes from something man-made equaled sudden fascination, kaleidoscopic wonder, death nonetheless. A marshal and his posse were killed outright, a tally of their bodies showing they hadn't fired off a single round in response. Role Tanner, a contemporary of mine in the Pinkerton Ranger service, deliberately shied off an assault with a simple shrug, "It'd be an unwinnable war". Me, I just wondered: these people in their encampment of gleaming polished metal, weird red rocks, licking fires, stars above -did it breed in them an artistic disposition, maybe even a spiritual one? Even killers can get some funny ideas about the nature of reality.

I got a partial answer at the close of the year, 1899. The vogue of the Christmas festival had suddenly become a thing in every mid-size church you saw, and if the town had an adjoining saloon, doubly so. Whether Catholic, Protestant, Lutheran, folks would turn out to worship and then celebrate with a drink and fine meat. Some folk would forego the church service, choosing to dine-out in the coloured lights.

The Bullet Gang, so called.

I remember standing in front of the main street saloon of Sweetwater. An early-twenties girl in a Spanish tunic over long-johns was beholding the festivities just as closely as me. And we got to talking, laughing while revealing nothing whatsoever about our lives. In other words, exactly how it should be if you want your love affair to last as long as possible. She was beautiful, with a beautifully unconventional voice, perchance that we should talk forever about nothing. Damn gut-squirming unease when we finally came to discuss our pulpy robot intrigues. Meet Starra.

Beholding the frantically bobbing lanterns, listening to the fiddle which turned on a dime, I said, "Rough crowd".

"What makes you think _l'm_ not rough?"

"Gentlemanly discretion", suavely.

"But you're a ranger, I'm a member of the Bullet Gang. Do you plan on jailing me?"

I remember thinking carefully what to do. Taking in the sight of her, notwithstanding that, in my youth, I was a shy fella around the opposite sex. "Are you the leader?"

"You can see I'm not!", she scowled. "In raids, I watch the perimeter. In ambushes, I haul loot, step-up to bitches who reckon the men won't hurt them -a couple of other things I don't want to say because you'll think badly of me".

Saying, "I won't think badly of you. No one really has a conscience in this life anyway, but self-knowledge is the next best thing. How come you aren't in there with the rest of the gang?"

"Like I say, I watch the perimeter", she shrugged. "It's a habit I've gotten into. Besides, I don't really drink to socialize. When I start, it goes down my neck like water, and always ends with me taking a poor unsuspecting fella to bed".

Starra always did that. Said, 'I don't want to tell you what I did, because you'll think badly of me' -only to reveal something equally bad during the same conversation. Assuming, of course, that the original thing she didn't want to tell me wasn't supremely, transcendently evil. 'Killed farmer's dog while outlaws raped wife, because I hate farmers, the way I'll probably hate you some day'. Who knows? All I knew was, that night, and each and every time I saw her afterwards, I was falling in love.

I used my master key to let us into the doctor's office across the way. The owners had their own Christmas decorations in the form of stained glass covers for their kerosene pitchers. Starra lit a select few with her flint tacks. On the uncomfortable slave-wood chairs, we talked for hours.

We talked at the communal watering hole at Peek's Slant. At the mail deposit station in the crazy-leafy valley near Bonetown. By that point, we had in-jokes and funny little tropes to guide us along. Kissing, getting to know the feel of her waist, I came to believe we somehow had a future together. This girl who claimed to have toughened up as the result of a stormy childhood, but still cried when she had to change a wagon spoke because it wasn't a ladylike job.

Are you getting a picture of Starra? She was small, five foot one. She had blonde hair. Not that straw-textured muck which you and I have from being out in the sun too much, but some kinda vanilla luster from a superior race. Skin, the white glow that belies the toughness of every square inch, and always weirdly undamaged considering the dirty Mexican cigarettes she doted on.

Above all, her face, just a glance, always gave me a feeling of optimism in my belly. The enthusiastic ripple of her lower eye lids and her distinctive chin; I looked forward to seeing how she'd age. Only greater beauty would come.

Memories of watching the ranks of burros at the Opie Park Mill. She loved to stroke their rag-fur ears.

"If you became a rancher", she asked me, "what would you call your mule?"

"What do you mean, 'if'? I'll certainly end up as a bent-up old rancher. You'll be there as my favourite outlaw ghost. As to the name of my mule, hell if I know".

" 'Hell-if-I-know' would be a good name for a mule', she said. "And I can see you as a worn-out old farmer. You'll probably sleep-walk into it the way you sleep-walk into everything. It's like you're not a real person".

I expected her to qualify this with something nice, but she didn't.

"Are you telling me people don't sleep-walk into becoming _outlaws?_"

"Frankly, we don't", Starra stared glumly at nothing. "We choose to be raiders because there's a bit of life to us".

"Unless", I remember thinking hard, "all of life is a dream".

"And once again you change the subject by talking nonsense" -her gambit to keep the row going for hours, if only I had a reply.

I could sense the doom sneaking upon us. It wasn't necessarily the idea that our personalities were simply too different, but the evilness of the universe itself. And it sounds crazy, but I used to cling to the hope that Starra and I _were_ just fundamentally different. A crazy eschatology developed in me. In my life, I'd known a few interesting and highly moral people, but they were always few and far between. They always left me. Oh, I knew they still existed, but always at a clear radius away from me. New York? Chicago? These places must be like rich, ultra-cosmopolitan hives just by my absence. So I reasoned, God had created me as a kind of reverse-magnet. I repelled good people into the distance. Any folks who were half-and-half, I brought out the worse in, and then I knew I had to flee.

God made me this repulsive force, I reckoned, so that when I inevitably arrived in Hell, others would automatically belong in Heaven. It made sense. The human personality is too nuanced, and contradictory, and full of redemptive possibility to possibly weigh in the balance. I was needed as a token. It was even kinda reassuring.

A month or two after Christmas, a kind of half-organised horse-trading market took place in the oversized barns at Coopers Valley. Newly-erected telegraph wires on the hill overhead looked just like Roman crucifixes. In attendance was every kind of rough ranch-hand, swarthy field-worker, farmer-who-hated-farming. Also present was the Bullet Gang. Through my scope, I watched them walking among the pretentious Friesians, and the Lipizzans, and the Mustangs. They had too much respect for flashy horse breeders to want to rob them, and so the atmosphere was gentle. Obviously, the majority of my time was spent scanning around for Starra, but I couldn't see her.

In the tangle of scrub, I left my gun and my warrant papers. I removed my hat and slicked-back my hair so that it looked stoopid. The intention was to walk among my prey and gather intel, which is always a hell of a satisfying play. Thru crazily thick tent lines and hoss agility equipment, I walked like a shallow-breathing ghost, focused on acting, snooping, nothing to prepare me for a showdown -the encampment was so ad hoc, there were lots of hidden spaces and funny sand clearings between the structures, nothingy crossroads, walkways to nowhere.

The sense of surprise -supernatural. Starra was riding a tiny Bashkir. Suddenly no more than ten feet away, there was no time for me to assume any kind of expression. And she didn't have one anyway. In response to the lingering weirdness, she merely caused the burro to trot his hooves. Her shoulders swayed easily, soon giving in to the motion, adjusting it to a kind of dance. The horse pirouetted 360, slowly, hypnotically, the girl never breaking eye contact.

It was hard not to gape, though she herself remained expressionless.

"What did you have for supper last night?"

Out of the sun, it was hard to think. "Chicken, corn. Some chipotie sauce. You?"

"Nothing. I wasn't hungry".

I remember the staggered sound of my tone. "Are you OK?"

"I'm just in a quiet mood".

It went back and forth, each of us trying to be subtle in our own way. Starra's subtlety was in the service of -what? Seeing me dissolve?

"I don't want you to hate me".

"I couldn't ever hate you", I promised, which in a way is true.

"I'm pregnant. By my reckoning, it got conceived just a few weeks before we met".

"OK", said Mr Practical. "So, you're gonna go off with the pa?"

"No. He's just a friend. You'd probably think of him as a random cowboy".

I tried to instill that I couldn't blame her for living her own life. We'd only known each other a short time, after all. Then she asked if I still wanted to see her, which caused me to be possessed by some supreme pragmatism. Telling that I didn't fall in love easy. Telling that I only needed to know one thing -was she tricking me?

"I'm not. You know how independent I am".

"Yeah. I reckon I do", I said.

We stood staring at each other, the horse still moving. It haunts me that there might have been sadness in my eyes. The desperation, I guess, was fine.

Eventually, she was prompted to ask whether I needed time to think things over. I must have looked confused somehow, even when I insisted, "No".

Artistically, the sunlight moved exactly with the desert wind. It was a moment of oblivion.

"I could be a pa to the child".

"Yes", she replied, a little too quickly, a little too uncertainly. "But you __do__ need time to think things over".

"Will I see you soon, away from this place?", meaning the miscreant horse show.

"Of course!"

"The saloon, in Sweetwater mainstreet, tomorrow noon?"

"Of course!"

The curtness of the situation -I chalked up to two people at the strangest, most unprecedented moment of their long lives. You realise you enjoy liquorice. You buy your first horse from a man with expressionless eyes. I could only shake myself from the reverie by physically cricking my neck, slowly starting to walk away.

"Before you go", she said, almost smiling, "I made you a present, to show I still like you".

" 'Made me'?", I was incredulous.

"We invented a game. The Bullet Gang, I mean. You take a slug, something low caliber like a 380. Rest it between two flints. The flints you attach to a thin little twig, then cake the whole thing in ground clay. But here's the thing. Also in there with the bullet and the flints, there's a promise, written on a fancy piece of parchment. The idea is, two people grasp each end of this thing and pull. The flints make the lady-bullet explode, and whoever gets the half with the promise -well, the other person has to abide by it. 'Make breakfast for a month', 'Clean the hind of my horse', whatever.

Sheepishly, Starra handed me just such a strange object. It looked like nothing more sophisticated than a long twig covered in clay, just a few tufts of rag poking here and there.

"Should we pull it now?", I was fascinated.

"Nah. Later. When we're more relaxed".

'When we're more relaxed', she said, as if there could be such a time for us.

"To save me hanging around here, will you tell me the latest membership of the Bullet Gang? How much weaponry and ammo they have?"

She blinked thoughtlessly. Against the steel sky, her heavily-blushered cheeks seemed doubly surreal, doubly beautiful. Maybe she really was blushing, a psychosomatic thing riled up by the pregnancy.

Coolly, "Are you going to try and kill them today?"

"I may not ever try to kill them. But it's my job to make plans".

She told me three or four men, names like, 'Rusk Skuller', plus two strangers who'd drifted into the gang in the past forty-eight hours.

You know that feeling you get in a waking nightmare? Of time running out, while the most obvious thing that might just save you goes unsaid? 'If you love me, come away with me'. Only you know -it can't be said. This world resists clear-thinking. It resists obvious solutions.

No kind of character, I removed to my lodgings and drank a single whiskey in my room. I paced, sat at my rickety desk, filled out a report that was painful but at the same time -wrote itself. The whiskey burned in my stomach and just a little in my head. This wasn't a situation that would get emotional clarity trough liquor, praise-be even if it got messy. It wasn't a situation that would be solved by walking around town, staring semi-mindlessly at the horses, the ageless creosoted boards, the ranks of timber still part of the mossy, majestic forest so many miles removed. Loneliness exists only when you look straight at it. Longing and impatience also. It's all a strange kind of maze.

I saw girls who looked like Starra. God help me they looked cheap. Town visitors sometimes watched me. The unnatural cleanliness of their clothes was only countermanded by creases, the way the bleached desert made all things look well-used. I could tell people wanted to join me. I'd snarl and tell them to go to hell, except that would only have intrigued them further, made them more determined to follow. Dreams are satisfying but they're foolish. We're all of us imbeciles when it comes to our dreams.

A wintery chill played at my fingers. I remember that.

I remember checking the bulk-loader of my revolver, the snap-trigger of my carbine. Locking my hand across the hilt of my saddle, pulling myself tall to ride out, there was a deadness in my thoughts with really only one conception: I would kill the bullet gang and deliver Starra or die trying. It was stoopid and irrational, but no more than anything else in life.

At the half-mesa in Tuscarora, glacial entrance to Hell that is was, I eyeballed the first, second and third outcrop of boulders that might hide a look-out. It was time to dismount and stalk forward, if not exactly creep. The marble-like pillar of rock was tight against the ravine furrow, and when I saw the barrel of a carbine poke clear, I aimed roughly, counting on a certain amount of ricochet and bone-shatter to take the sap down. All that really mattered to me was the oversized knuckles, ensuring me I wasn't about to annihilate Starra herself.

A violent yelp followed by ponderous moaning motivated me to do nothing more significant than hang back against the ancient curved rock, mainly to be sure the look-out wasn't mobile enough to come after me, mostly to avoid the main body of outlaws if they came charging. A strange, ugly silence told me it was OK to creep onwards, upwards, around.

Intuition told me the gunman was immobile but not yet dead. So it proved. His ragged shooting arm was shaking, he had a serious gouge in his temple, still his eyes roved.

"Where are your friends? How many?", I made a point of glaring into his barely conscious eyes.

"They went raiding, east. No …south", he gasped, wallowing. "Towards the plains. No mountains".

I rode a little way on into their camp. I looked as much for Starra, or some impossible idea of Starra, as I did for any concealed bushwhackers. It was twilight, with half the sky looking like the tides of the sea, half like a solid wall of ice-storms. A tempest. From just beyond the fancy lean-tos, coyotes gave abrupt little cries, clearly not happy with the unseasonable chill. Wondering, why didn't they come and help themselves to the meat residue that'd been left on the campfire?

The embers gave off the most whispy smoke. It was the laziest vision of hell. The center ground of the camp consisted of a huge oilskin canopy that had been hoisted between distant tree trunks, underside boasting a Confederate banner, at which I blanched. This was no resurgent band of Greybacks. They'd hoisted the flag as some kind of stupid, over-excited joke. Luggage trunks held no clues and nothing of interest. A tambourine, a distillation tank, a horse-shoe game. Above all, no indication of which compartment Starra might call home. The thought of her merely bedding down with a lithe wideboy outlaw, like a willing concubine: even if a man can draw strength by facing his worst fears, some things are too dark to contemplate in full.

Out into the prairie, alongside silently tumbling gulley. Bearing towards the resilient copper trees and acres of rotting thorn beds, now following intuition alone. It was becoming such a dark night, moreso than any in known memory. The air got thinner and mistier, giving all surfaces a frightening grey blur. I rode on, unfathomable madness coming mile after mile.

At a slight cusp which presented a five or six mile outlook, I took in every inch in a heartbeat. Terse and ragged though that heartbeat was.

They were fools.

They were not merely robbing a ranch, they were sadistically taking the place apart, setting the sheep free, burning down an out-building for all the world to see. The smoke rose straight up like an arrow. To make the scenario more conspicuous still, the tortured ranchers frequently gave horrified screams. The gunshots carried for miles. I was a lawman with a vague chance of killing the majority of the gang, but the commotion could equally have brought in something far more abundant; soldiers, a night courier, a county-to-county stage, a shepherd, maybe even a rival outlaw gang. Everyone carries guns. Everyone has a shred of bravado gun-fighting hubris.

So with all this laid on a plate, I crept forward on the inside of what had once been the heather-lined main carriageway. Aged fence converged with aged fence and it was here that I lingered, getting my bearings, clutching the barrel of my six-shooter, delicately holding the nickel-plated carry neck of my carbine.

' _In raids, I watch the perimeter'_ , Starra had famously said.

Question: if I had seen her there, simply watching for interlopers, would we have fled together and left the ranchers to their fate? Would we have vanished into the night, even if I had to clamp my hand over her mouth and set our heels into a dragging match?

Impossible to say, even if Starra had been anywhere in sight among the scrubbed porches and empty corrals. Between the ranch proper and the compound stations there was a deeply shadowed walk-space barely big enough for an adult male. It was nonetheless the route I took through the hell-commotion, alongside clumpy pine walls, the industrial sand screens, measured footstep over measured footstep towards the crazy showdown.

This is what they were doing to the poor ranchers. In the middle of the track that flowed up to the main building was an outcrop with a twenty foot pine tree. At gun-point, the outlaws had made a young girl climb a ladder to hang household items among the branches. No sooner had she released the item than one of the gang shot it to pieces. She cringed and recoiled as a cup or a lampshade exploded while her fingertips were still touching. So it was a game. A William Tell-style test of precision. Bloodied on the ground, leaning up as best he could, a man I took to be the girl's father was pleading, 'Please don't hurt her! She's all I have!' Sometimes he pleaded, 'She's a doctor! She's more valuable to you alive!"

This was debatable, since the leader of the outlaws had a pronounced nihilistic streak. As his lieutenants took trick-shots, he held forth with a strange, inhuman monologue. I couldn't understand what made him speak that way: he was handsome, with sad eyes and a contemplative mouth. Still there was nothing in his mind except a complete disregard for the whole human race. Verbatim.

"She seems like a nice girl. I'm a hundred percent sure of that. But in what context? Just under the surface, everyone is self-indulgent, antagonistic. It's not even their fault. That's just the way it is. Neuro-plasticity is hardly helping".

Giving in to the bleakness of the situation, the father-figure merely sobbed.

The gang took increasingly careless, ill-advised shots. As the girl hung a small fiddle in the branches, several of the gunshots missed completely, the violent reports making me jump, even as I believed I was accustomed to the tension.

The leader held up a black-gloved palm to instruct the gang to cease-fire.

"Give the lady a few moments to hang a couple of things at once".

She did so hurriedly, at one point dropping a bone-china milk pitcher onto the ground, smashing it to smithereens. No one got angry: the philosophical outlaw merely continued his soliloquy as she worked.

Conversationally, "You know, a thousand years from now, people won't look at each other the way they do now. We won't _love_ the same way. No one will look at anyone and think, 'Well, she's beautiful', or, 'she has a great personality'. We'll see inside each other's heads. The neural flow in our brains, like sunrise moving across a stain glass window".

This strange outlaw, he casually bounced the hammer of his gun, cleanly destroying some cups, a watering can, a framed photograph, all the while speaking in a beat, "Supernatural thunderstorms. An eternity of such wild thunderstorms, only anything but random. Rearing like shoals of glitter fish. Along the axon membranes. Curving like the waist of your finest lover along the quantum micro tubules of this dendrite, that synaptic receptor. And on and on with very neuron shining. Like a heliotropic sea of city lights all forming into a dance -or rapture".

I listened. If his homily was abstract, his skill with a gun was assured by proportion, almost to the point where the girl in the tree was relatively unphased whenever an item exploded alongside her. Even her father's weeping was muted somehow, at one with the inky desert. Everything had a brief feeling of repose.

As did Starra. She'd appeared alongside the burning outbuilding, eyes glistening as the perfect bystander. I knew she carried no gun, her talk of bullets notwithstanding. I assured myself she'd be a non-combatant in the coming gunplay.

Because for all his skill, there was a chance I could beat the gang leader, see him dead and his subordinates in disarray. Because I had the element of surprise. Also a zen-like confidence wrought by love.

My enemy continued his pot-shots, his strange poetry of brain-chemistry, as I readied myself with bearings and theories of covering fire.

I remember –and it really doesn't matter if the memory is phantasmagorical, since I'm the only one who gives it meaning—I was maybe ten years old, treated by my folks to a gunfighting show in Chicago. Fancy shooting and ridiculously nonexistent thinking time; this is all that was lusted for in my childlike heart. What occurred, having been led through abundantly decorated streets, was an unspeakably large concert hall with the stage festooned with cymbals and iron pans. It was cold; there was nothing to stop the chilly air permeating the aisle, all contributing to a weird sense of awe. Clearly, the expectation was that a very nonchalant gunslinger would proceed to shoot from the hip, firing blindly at his back, pulling any number of balletic poses all the while decimating every single target with a satisfying twang.

Life is unpredictable, though, and magical. A handsome, smooth-faced man clambered up on stage. Alongside him was a woman, very blinky, ostensibly looking like a school teacher. This, he revealed, was his good wife, and together, they'd put on a show that -well, maybe it would work and maybe it wouldn't.

"Ladies and Gentlemen", he said gravely, "There is nothing more mysterious than the hidden dimensions which the Good Lord has seen fit to give the human mind. We absorb skills, intuitions, instincts -that forever remain hidden from the conscious mind".

Asking for complete silence and conjuring an air of solemnity on a par with a spiritualist conducting a séance, the man told how he would hypnotise his wife to shoot and hit every obtuse target on the stage. Normally, he told, she could barely hold a gun, let alone hit true. Still he insisted that she could be impelled to aim and hit the marks simply by the power of his mesmerism.

Of course, in hindsight, it was clear that his wife –if that's indeed who she was—was simply a highly-skilled gunslinger in her own right, though in those unenlightened days, you could no more have decried casual misogyny as expounded the aeronautics of the Wright Brothers. As it was, all we had was fascination. The placid-looking lady kept her 'unconscious' head bowed as two heavy-looking irons –I guess they would have been Colliers— were heaped solidly into her hands. With the act of pseudo hypnosis, a hush befell everyone, alongside just a few contemptuous splutters that it would all end badly. Tension and incredulity mingled crazily in the festive atmosphere, not least when the man said, "When I click my fingers, you'll immediately turn and fire on the target behind you".

I remember, the audience seemed to take a single inhalation which culminated in the husband clicking his fingers.

At which point the lady, still 90 percent unconscious, automatically raised the barrel to her husband's face and callously pulled the trigger –which brought uproarious laughter once the audience realized the iron contained no bullets.

"Jo-Beth, wake!", he cowered. "Wake!"

His wife returned to her dour state of waking consciousness.

"Jo-Beth, that didn't go so well".

He repeated the hypnotic process, even with the greater part of the audience giddily laughing. Painstakingly, "When I click my fingers, you'll immediately fire –not at my face- but at the target directly behind you. Behind you, there's a large target. I want you to turn and shoot at it. The target. Not my face. Please".

Breathy laughter turned to an expectant hush as –click—Jo-Beth did indeed lumber round on her heels to nigh sightlessly pull the trigger at the red circle some twenty feet away. Quite the actress: something about the slant of her shoulders and the stiffness of her neck really made me question whether she might truly be hypnotized.

"Okay, that's very good", said the husband. Then he sighed a little. "Jo-Beth, I'm going to trust you now with some real bullets. Does that sound like a good idea to you?"

Even within her twilit trance, the woman seemed strangely out-of-touch.

"Jo-Beth?"

In an undertone, she mumbled the chorus of a song, now swinging her arms like a child. Hilariously, the Southern drawl was in complete difference to her husband's east-coast eloquence, _'Well that dirty little Coward that shot Mr Howard, he laid poor Jesse in his grave…'_

This brought such laughter from the audience it seemed unlikely they'd recover any time soon. Myself, I was in awe at the whole thing. The quality of their acting; the way they must really have loved and believed in each other in order to carry out such a strange act.

"Jo-Beth, I'm going to click my fingers. Remember, now, the target, not my face".

" _In the hand of every yellow rose, a yellow shotgun_ ", she said inexplicably.

The husband made a heavy sigh –but clicked his fingers nonetheless.

In any case, this is what we came to see. For the longest time, she ignored the target at her back and instead blasted away in vast arcs, all the pans and cymbals directly above their heads, close by their feet, high up in the unvarnished rafters. Hard to believe just twelve shots were being expended. The husband cowered in much the same way we in the audience hitched our breaths. The thoughtless zen-like precision: awesome beyond words, the human brain simply unable to comprehend. We comprehended it even less, or at least, were alive only to weeping laughter, when a small, dungareed boy ran into the middle of the shooting match yelling, 'Daddy, daddy, is it my turn to fire the guns?'

Chaos reigned everywhere, in every mind, all except for the faux-hypnotised Jo-Beth's, her apparently closed eyes fluttering in perfect REM overdrive.

If you think too hard about your aiming, you miss wildly.

It's an ever-widening snare: if it even _occurs_ to you that you're over-thinking, you miss by an even greater margin. Less than fifteen feet from me, the prosaic outlaw leader was smoothly blasting every tiny object in the tree. Soon he'd stop and kill the rancher and his daughter, simply because he had no reason to keep them alive. Ironically, I only needed one true aim to stop the whole thing.

I aimed at his throat and squeezed the trigger. Or rather, the signal eased from my brain to my finger but was somehow …deadened en route. I aimed at his temple. His heart. My trigger reflex icily refused to co-operate even in its simplest job.

What was happening? Was I going insane? It was possible I was having some variety of panic attack, or more likely still, God Himself was instilling a lesson that I should check my hubris when it came to killing another of His children. Granted, I'd be saving the captives, but what did that matter when I cared almost nothing for them and everything for Starra?

Very well, I thought. We'll do it, as they say, 'the hard way'. I had a plan –it was ambitious, but I guess no more ambitious that my hoping I could somehow have been a pa to Starra's child.

Because my God-sequestered right hand had no objections to aiming off, _just a little,_ and so in a feat of derring, I blasted the revolvers clean from the Bandit King's grasp. First the left, then the right. Knowing I had such little time before he scrambled in the dirt to retrieve them, I quickly shot dead his lieutenants. The villain with the long face. The villain with the shaved skull and greasy muzzle. The one that looked a little like me. The fifth gang member scrambled for cover and caused me no end of ire. He lurched alongside a fortified bull fence, all the while returning shots which burned the air above my scalp. It came to pass that I aimed and fired at him with a fool-hardy determination, eventually arriving at a lethal shot close to his jugular.

No sooner had I turned to face Starra's direction—

The Bandit King sauntered towards me, filling my vision, in fact. Interestingly, there was no hesitation in pulling my revolver's trigger –now that the wheel was empty. My grim reaper produced an ugly smile. As I scrambled away, he shot out my legs. I felt the bones splinter and compact in the most elaborate explosion of blood. For luck, or maybe as punishment for shooting at him in the first place, he put a bullet in the fore of my shooting arm.

This man, he kept his bullets in the pocket of his Herringbone jacket. Funny; I normally liked gunfighters who did that.

He smirked, "Lateral thinking, shooting the guns from my hands. You're quite the hero".

The irony came from me in a single breath, "No".

"Well, anyway. Give my regards to the Buddha of biomechanics".

He shot me in stomach, famously the most slow and agonizing death that could be relayed by a gun.

Turning to leave, "Starra! Let's ride!"

My girl was in shock. Still she had the presence of mind to have picked up one of the dropped revolvers.

If only the pistol-whipped farmer hadn't been spurred to do the same. He lurched to his ragged knees, took aim and shot Starra dead.

Irritated more than emotion-wrenched, the Bandit King in turn shot dead the rancher and his daughter. With the gait of a man loosening-up after a swim, he unhitched his horse and trotted away into the night.

Now it was my intention to man-up through the pain, drag myself over to Starra -dead-eyed and breathless though she was.

It wasn't going to happen. There was a worse chill than anything I'd felt in my life, though in time it became a funny kind of warmth, like sprawling in bed on a high-winter's morning. I was alongside the burning out-building, alive with such yellow flames that could seemingly have danced forever.

Memories of laying on my side and clenching my teeth in a kind of instantaneous fever. Beyond that, a last thought: Starra's game –the message set within the exploding twig. I withdrew it from my kitbag, hands not really feeling what they were doing, nerves and muscles all operating at a fraction of human speed. Still I managed to pull the thing apart, even though it was a two-man effort at the best of times.

The explosive of the lady-bullet made a dramatic bang. Badly messing the parchment with blood as I unfolded it, still the block capitals were easy enough to read.

She had drawn a heart. Inset, the words, ' _I THINK I COULD REALLY LIKE YOU. IT'S JUST THAT I ALWAYS THINK YOU'RE FAKE'._

Well, in the act of losing consciousness, hope, the will to live -I noticed that the parchment was too thick to be folded paper alone; waggling it, a small golden wedge fell to the dust. Some kind of closing present. A Jew Harp.

And for the longest time, I _sensed_ the time, but…

Either side of the unconsciousness, the world spun crazily.

I woke in a bed in overcast sunlight. Curiously, I didn't marvel that I could either have remained alive or made it to the afterlife -either one of which should have been an awe-inspiring outcome. I didn't think about it then, I don't think about it now. Instead, I just lay there, feeling –

Arrogant. Evil. Unnecessary.

In time, a woman in a medical shawl entered; I felt a tide of over-emotional nonsense bubble into my throat, though I kept it under control as ever.

"Ranger Towers? Armand?"

She'd read the name in my warrant papers no doubt, and it was one of the few times I didn't bristle at the overfamiliarity of someone calling me by my first name. Explaining that I was at the Solavideo Transit Station, my intestine and limbs having been repaired by a surgeon from Chicago who'd long since taken his leave. The bill had been picked up by the Ranger Service –not that the ins-and-outs of commercial law enforcement weren't now as tenuous an idea as the Gods of Olympus. Throughout the woman's explanations, the exact nature of my wounds weren't discussed; I just took it for granted that I'd be laid-up for months on end, and even when I was moving again, I'd forever be half-crippled.

A refusal of Opies, because if nothing else, I'm a disciplined man. That cool determination of giving-not-taking; it also translated to paying my dues when it came to entertaining the other ambulatories. I recreated infamous 'Wanted' posters with a fine carbon pencil, played dominoes, formed origami horses, anything shy of playing Starra's Jew Harp –which I still owned and had taken to wearing on a cord around my neck, despite the fact that I'd always loathed men who carried nick-nacks or wore even modest jewelry.

Mostly I told stories.

Days in, there was Jack, a 12-year-old boy deeply afflicted by some kind of lung ailment. He seemed interested in my tales of being a ranger, all those scouting-and-manhunting days, so I regaled them as best I could, really just to take his mind off the illness. Such an excitable, romantic view of simply doing a day's work.

The boy had an abacus to aid with his teaching, all covered with square-root letters. One day he said, 'I bet you have a tale for every one of these beads'. It occurred to me that I did, and in the smallest way, this disturbed me. It disturbed me that I was starting to enjoy the telling beyond all proportion.

The occasion I was viciously fired upon while crossing the plank bridge at Randall's Canyon. The occasion I tracked down Rain Younger in a blizzard, the whole county swamped in four feet of snow. Think of a desert, I think of Vasquez Basin and the 10-party shoot-out among rocks no bigger than sheep, all the while conjuring the whole affair in superlatives that would make the most hyperbolic Penny Dreadful writer blush. Men live, men die. Clearing a house and feeling the eyes of an all-business killer on me, shooting the latrine until he flees, thereafter stumbling to fall hundreds of feet into a ravine.

The letters on that abacus: how I glared at them. As little Jack said, I had a story for every one, but what's more, I had stories to spare. They were exciting, maybe even meaningful, at least in terms of life-and-death being such a strange, hypnotic affair. It was never enough, though.

I started to believe my life was a thing of horror. It was horrific before Starra and it was horrific now. And if a man is inclined to look for such gnostic inconsistences, why did I never see the weirdness of my injuries: in my memory of the shoot-out, I was hit in the flex of my elbow, yet the mass of deformed scar-tissue was now square in the middle of the forearm. Explain.

Much later, by years. Grainy purple dusk played at the saloon window, incredibly dark but also hinting at an impossibly bigger world beyond the one-street town. On the table opposite, some oversized newcomers were playing Omaha Scramble and, as ever, there was such a rich satisfaction at not having to gamble myself. That slight raise by the foot of the double-stairs? Maeve hung above us like dragon, distributing her working girls as best she could with such a meagre trickle of guests. In difference to the idea that being a madam in an ad-hoc brothel must be one of the bleakest, therefore admirable, roles a person can take –today was just stolid, any emotions carried along neatly by the falsetto piano playing 'Easy Livin'. Existential twinkle-in-my-eye in dominance or counter-balance as I was joined by newcomer. I'd pretended not to scrutinize him as he came in through the serif swing-gates, all-time stoopid mode of entrance that they are.

I said, "Howdy, stranger. Don't bother queuing at the bar. Take a seat with me and we'll get drinks soon enough".

He smiled numbly. Thirty-plus years old. Ginger-haired, though I knew before he even said a word that he wasn't Scots or Irish. A man from the future.

"' _Howdy_ _,_ _Stranger'",_ he reflected on my opening gambit. "I can practically hear the parenthesis".

Waving with the fingers of my non-crippled hand. "I apologise if I seem too knowing".

"Actually? That's exactly what I'm here to talk to you about", his smile getting ever more subtle. "You're just _one_ _knowing_ cowboy. And you're about to have the conversation of your life".

I bristled at this. The conversation-of-my-life, if there could be such a shameful concept, had long since passed with Starra. Thinking always, _'I could be a pa to the child'._

What we talked about, then -verbatim. I'm not denying there were cosmic revelations and matters profound, but never mistake those things for true significance.

"What do you suppose the truth is of this world? Is there a god, Mr Towers?"

"I guess".

This man took my under-enthused shrug for something of dazzling interest. "And what do you suppose the nature of that God is? Good? Evil? Indifference?"

"Careless, I should say. Are you fitting up a 'Wanted' poster for Him?"

My new friend laughed, quite genuinely. We started on a round of Whiskey.

"The truth is, there are Gods-within-Gods. Plenty of different levels, each operating with practically no awareness of the Gods below or above them".

"This is certainly…", I wondered aloud, then grudgingly confirmed, "…a strange conversation".

"And yet, I get the feeling that you know instinctively that there's some truth in what I'm saying".

Leisurely swirling my gut-rot whiskey in such a way that distracted him, "How can you be quite so sure just what I 'know'?"

"Because the Gods have taken an interest in you", leaning forward excitedly, while I lounged on.

Oblivious to our conversation-to-end-all-conversations, Maeve angled her long, elegant neck in a mindless reverie. Oriental fan moving neither absent-minded or wholly on purpose, just _quick_ like the wings of a hummingbird. Between 'Easy Livin' and 'Dixie Diablo', the old boy on the piano had paused to test some random keys, fearing that the tuning of the tiny falsetto prop had somehow gone astray. The thinking in my head, 'Baloney. There can be no greater existential truth than this exact moment, in this exact place'.

"I think the best way I can explain it is this", my friend keenly hunched forward. "The World of the Gods, the place I come from, is like the unreformed South before Lincoln. We exploit the mortals as every other ranch and every other farmer exploited slaves. Some people might say we're worse still: what we do can hardly be called work. We trade you as a theatre owner trades actors. making you perform elaborate stories just for our entertainment".

I laughed. He didn't laugh back. Explaining myself, "You're confused, son. When I was a ranger, I spent weeks on the frontier, alone. No one was around. I hunted and killed the most vicious criminals in a way that, hell, I'm not going to lie –it was exciting. It was exhilarating so that my heart beat and writhed like it was gonna go to heaven right then and there. But there was no one around to see. I was entertaining no one".

"As your Gods, we have the ability to put fabricated memories into your mind. Either that, or –maybe you _did_ spend all that time on your own, chasing criminals. This world you live in is complex and elaborate. It has incidents and accidents _to spare_ ".

Smiling softly, holding off from my whiskey and sucking him down into my mesmerizing hell.

"Where is Starra buried? I asked everyone. No one seems to know. If you're a god, you can tell me".

The purest confusion, "Starra?"

He took out a computer tablet, which in my naivety took to be some kinda soothsayer reflecting pool. Studying the depths, finding her name and image.

"Starra Watts. A moll in the Bullet Gang".

I didn't argue over 'moll'. "Where're her mortal remains?"

"She was-", he dryly scoured for the words, "—reincarnated, beyond all recognition. It would have been painless".

I confess, it was here that my emotions got the better of me. Old Boy's playing of 'Dixie Diablo' seemed to hit a dozen bum notes, just before I realized it was only the pulse in my ears playing an almighty trick. The outlaw king who'd led Starra to her death had been one of the Gods. With all his futuristic talk of brain chemistry, he'd been as detached from humanity as a living being ever could be. Still I was tactful enough to keep this realization under my hat. Suffice it to say,

"Well it was painful to me. Who are you, who is any God, to decide who lives and who dies?"

"Towers, what we do might be cruel, but it isn't thoughtless".

"Do tell", I was sardonic.

"Your world has a type of sanity which is missing from ours. This world has an economy which is based on market demand, but it also values individuality. You shouldn't feel hard-done-by. Your people, Towers, they get out of bed in the morning and they see a job in front of them that needs doing. A role to fill. Rancher. Hoss driver. Madam. Saloon owner. Even just –an old gold prospector who secretly knows he'll find barely a few grams to buy a slice of jerky and a jar of moonshine.

"In the World of the Gods? We give ourselves the most fanciful roles but with not enough economic slack to ensure our survival. People wanted the excitement of being soldiers, and so our civilization became mired in arbitrary and far-flung wars. People wanted jobs in high-power business - our world became all administration with no one doing any actual work. If we were wise, we'd welcome having our freedom limited the way yours is".

I suggested, "You're welcome to swap places any time you like. I always wanted to be a God".

A theatrical gulp from my friend. I wondered if he was one of those newcomers who handled their liquor badly.

"It's more likely that all our conceits are going to ruin this world as surely as it ruined ours. But what do I know?"

"What _do_ you know, pilgrim?", I said charismatically.

"I know that you're special, Mr Towers, and that's why you've come to everyone's attention. Whenever visitors leave this world, they fill out a customer satisfaction report. Their analysis of you? There's no one anywhere who's received quite as much varied feedback".

He consulted his tablet.

"' _The old ranger in the saloon was totally heartwarming. He reminded me of my own grandpa'"._

Raising an eyebrow. "I aim to please".

Except immediately he moved on to darker territory, _"_ Well, you've got _that,_ versus _, 'I hated the old man in the saloon. He told good stories, but he was rude and abrasive"._ The fact is, you seem to have mood swings that are completely unaccountable even through the super-sophisticated algorithm that's set in your brain".

Obviously, I needed to ask what an 'algorithm' was, but soon after I accepted the varying things that had been said about me. By all the scurrying little tourist rats.

"Please send my apologies at the earliest opportunity. Although, you know, if you're a God, you could equally just strike me down with a thunderbolt".

Laughter. I wondered if he was deliberately holding off his last mouthful of Whiskey, just before he gulped it down with gusto.

"Your varying moods are actually the exact things that've saved you. In fact, given you opportunities no one else could even imagine. Normally, whenever a being such as yourself gets even a fraction of the disapproval ratings you have, much less veers in unpredictability, we tend to put you into cold storage. Except this time, my company, the company that made you-"

"'Company'", I sought clarification, "as in company of soldiers?"

"No, as in corporation, financial concern…"

I nodded, 'Ah'd' as if this was the most natural conversation in the world.

"We have investors and business partners everywhere. Two in particular have sponsored us to keep you active as an ongoing concern. One is a theatrical company running studies on the viability of having beings such as yourself on stage alongside method actors, maybe just spending the most amount of time improvising. The other is an advance technology firm working on something called 'Nth Degree Artificial Intelligence".

Not missing a beat, catching him off-guard in the most delicious way, "How can anyone's intelligence be 'artificial' if they've been created by God?"

"I –don't really have an answer for that. I think they mean –artificial just in contrast to …"

"The Gods themselves?", prompting him, almost kindly.

"Yeah".

His voice was ghostly. Now our conversation grew slower. I swilled my liquor and peeked out of the window at the badly-reinforced planks of the estate offices, the overflow boarding rooms, the dust that was hardly ever stirred-up alongside the surgery. Why do horses tap their hooves and nod their heads at the same time?

"Mister, I can assure you that what little intelligence I have comes directly from my ma and pa, long dead though they are".

"You never had parents", he informed me in a single intake of air. "They were a memory which we put neatly in your head. I'm not saying it's not a underhanded way to go about things, but ..they never existed".

This God-man, I informed him, "My mother was the assistant to a Lutheran minister in Rapid. My phantom father was a farmer, same town. If you had a couple of spare days to ride in a coach, I could show you their graves back east. On their existence …we'll just have to agree to disagree".

"You don't understand. No one you've ever met has been real. No one's ever had a childhood. You exist just as …characters in a play. Laymen call you 'Robots'".

"That truth is too bleak to accept", I warned him. "Even if I knew what 'Robot' means".

But soon, a truce was formed. What else for it? If I was able-bodied, I'd have thrown myself onto a horse and galloped away over the sun-worshipping prairies, or the mossy corridors of Cameron's Basin, there to see a hummingbird and feel everything's right with the world. Instead, trapped, I wondered as I always did whether my debilitation at the hands of the outlaw had simply been the God forcing me analyze the philosophy of free will. Our discourse progressed, parallel with the ambient-faced pianist launching excitedly into 'Dirty Annie Saubry'. Beyond the brittle glass of the saloon window, there was a sensation of fierce sunlight blasting here and there, far and wide, though our eyes were never quick enough to detect the exact pulses.

"Mr Towers, your sponsorship by our satellite companies dictates we'll never again interfere with your mind. We're also giving you a limited amount of freedom. Of course, proportion being what it is, we can never allow you access to our world, but there are other places, probably call them 'brother' realities, running in parallel with this one. If you wanted, you could travel in these lands, explore them…"

By now, purely in a daydream, I'd been watching the saloon poker players. That funny little flip of the fingers, ebullient, whether they were confident of their cards or not; it exactly matched the motion I made with my own hand when I beckoned my friend to continue.

"We have a world based on the Samurai of ancient Japan".

"Swords frighten me", I said, almost completely sarcastic.

"In that case, we have a new world. Ambitious in every way. Perhaps you'll like it".

From his pocket, he removed a small leather-bound book. Everyone on Earth would recognize the shape, the layout of the pages, still he flipped through it in wonder.

"Provisionally, we're calling it Bible-Land".

"There to meet the Lord?", I asked, semi-serious.

"Perhaps" –completely serious.

"In that case…"

I heard my voice trail off, the most haunted and introspective thing in all the world. The God-man, he took it for consent, only, truth be told, I only had one conception my mind. I would ingratiate myself with the Gods. Thereafter I'd conduct a manhunt in Heaven itself. I would find the Outlaw King who'd led Starra to her death, discover a way of killing him.

"Tonight, drift off to sleep as you would normally", he advised. "When you wake, you will be in a completely new world".

Xc

Words, a shuffling of my painful and damaged limbs towards bed, feeling my eyelids grow heavy –the whole thing was a monstrous trick. 'Drift off to sleep as you would normally, when you wake…' –this implied that the process would be peaceful. Instead came such a pandemonium that I couldn't reckon who I was, where I was, or even that the confusion would lift any time soon. Think of being in a locomotive on a placid gradient, only for a lever to be abruptly pulled, firing you downhill, out of control, directly into bedlam.

To start with, the air itself was insane. In a way, it had the quality of a tornado, except far more physical. It was a kind of dry ocean tumult that could easily scour your flesh raw, in fact, rending my lips and eyelids into a greasy red inside seconds flat. I fancied I was on horseback, though unsurprisingly, the horse seemed to be in the process of being broken apart. Its spine rose monstrously at my waste as I struggled to stay upright.

Through the storm, I saw I had a friend. He yelled to me, "Melchior!"

Destructive to the flesh, the racing sandstorm (as I soon identified it) was also destructive to the mind. Madness came. Bit-by-bit, it revealed that my fellow and I weren't riding anything near conventional steeds. These were hideous caricatures of horses, with huge cankers on their backs, weird eyelashes, the oversized lips of a gurning grandpa. It was all senseless, but at least my pal was just as scared as I was. Our creatures clumped up together: we clung to each other's arms.

No tactics existed to try and spare yourself the disorientation of the storm. Quite simply, you weathered it or you choked, crumpled. Our limbs compressed into our torsos like living rocks. Lips were spread tight across teeth with a sternness I could never have imagined before.

Grave, ponderous, "Melchior, we're delivered".

I realized my pal was right. Defanged and receding away as a grey cloud, the storm revealed our backdrop to be a desert, expansive, heavy with dunes, all the way to the horizon. Twilight colours –though there wasn't the remotest certainty about the time of day—were dull purple, fire-red, bruised pink. More than anything, the lurid night sky made me think of a dozen all-night manhunts on the prairie of Tuscarora. Which is ironic.

Our 'horses' made eerie horn sounds.

And really, it was never peaceful. Gusts of air howled in the distance, nominal in themselves but grasping the heavy dunes with such a trailing, yelping noise. God help me, I had no idea what was going on, and I said as much. The words formulated in my throat in perfect English but emerged from my mouth in a bizarre foreign tongue.

"Balt!", cried my friend.

Balthazar, the third man of our party, was sitting in the sand, arms wrapped tightly around fetally-raised knees. Perhaps, before the storm had struck, he'd been peacefully relaxing next to our tent, subsequently several feet away as a ragged string of cloth. Soon, we identified that he'd been deeply traumatized, not by the blizzard of sand, but something else. Some kind of hallucination or unprecedented bad dream which he'd suffered in concurrence with the storm.

His eyes stared straight ahead. He explained, in our weird foreign language, "There is something very wrong with this world".

Well, which nobody can deny. For my part, I simply stared into the distance, the inhospitable ridge no more than thirty feet high, nevertheless looking as imposing as any Montana mountain range. Outcrops of rock with turquoise tufts existed purely to absorb your gaze, hypnotically. The sky equally inhuman. At our backs, a particularly featureless confluence of black among the purple nebulas revealed that we'd been travelling from the east; there was little more to be seen.

"There is something very wrong with –everything", warned Balthazar.

"The mission?", wondered Gaspar.

"We are cursed", he replied softly.

Insisted Gaspar, "We seek the prophesised King of Kings. He who'll bring peace to all Jews and all of Israel. How could our mission be cursed?"

Except, Balthazar went from strangeness to strangeness. Not one glance was wasted on we his fellow kings, or the beautifully baroque desertscape. He stared intensely at his own hand as if it was an inanimate object.

"I tell you we are cursed!", shouting.

Somewhat able-bodied now, the Gods had still left some original scar tissue across my joints and abdomen. Such a curious thing, the nape of my neck well-toughened from desert sun, while my arms and legs, particularly the exit wounds at my knees, feeling just like baby flesh. Ironically star-shaped, the scar on my belly was always susceptible to cold weather.

We all of us shivered.

It's a sign of holiness, I reckon, that no matter what kind of freezing atmosphere you're in, human touch can always bring a little warmth, far beyond that stoopid 37 degrees which we all need to stay alive.

I knelt to Balthazar and hugged him until he was less frightened.

Gaspar was frightened, too, but at least he could speak. He'd figured something out. "The eyes of the old gods are still on us. We must move on, secretly, with hope in our hearts that we are somehow…"

High in the unchanging purple-velvet sky, the star wavered and dodged in impossibly tiny movements. It sounds crazy, but it reminded me of Ossa, my pet dog from when I was a child. Or rather, just her eyes. We'd round off the day having caught a rabbit, or assisted my father in the catching of a roe, and then, bellies full, that crazy-intelligent hound would settle down on the end of my bed. She always stared up at me, intensely interested in whether I'd fallen asleep yet. I remember the tufts of blond in her brow, the fullness of her eyes …and then, in the end, just a tiny reflection of my bedside candle.

"Holy", I said.

"Holy", agreed Gaspar.

"Holy", confirmed Balt.

"Gentlemen? Let's ride".

Xce.

We arrived in Bethlehem in the morning. You could be inclined to call it 'the Morning of all Mankind' and I wouldn't argue. Air: brisk and able to proliferate the dim trace of daylight to maximum effect. For minutes on end, the star had been behaving strangely. It always kept the size of a regular star, but oftentimes spiking or swelling, maybe not even physically changing, just conjuring some optical illusion inside the fancy spectrums of light. It settled high above the outskirts of that tiny, magical town. Some initially sinister-looking outbuildings marked the perimeter.

We hitched our animals. I fed mine some sugarbeet, because I was no longer afraid of him, having allowed into my head the implicate concept of 'camels', the way I'd lately received so _much_ implicate data - and indeed relinquished some, too, including many a dark ethos that had once belonged to Ranger Armand Towers. Floating free now.

What a dark, beautiful world: if the star had fascinated us, something equally mesmerising was playing on the sand which led between the hasty buildings. White, subtly-diffused light seemed to fold around in geometric directions. And even when you'd successfully convinced yourself that it was simply artfully-refracted sunlight and nothing supernatural, there was no denying that it was leading us -somewhere.

Now among the stalls of mightily-horned cattle, every one of them mooing and baying –yet never violently and never in such a way that they disturbed the consciousness of the single man who stood staring into an ad-hoc crib.

The baby laughed, quite consciously. The man laughed. My friends and I joined in the humour and we all bundled together. The baby cooed and then resumed the roving of his eyes as Gaspar, Wanderer-King of Sheba, presented him with Frankincense. Shell-shocked but happy, Balt surrendered his Myrrh. It seemed ridiculous to give a baby a gold ingot, so placed my own present on a nearby two-by-four.

The baby looked at me questioningly, and it's hard to look away when the Messiah fixes you in his sights. Worse still when you're a man who isn't inclined to smile even at the best of times. The straw in his cot was illuminated somehow, each strand radiating a subdued white.

"You want something fun?", it occurred to me.

I removed Starra's Jew harp from my neck. Imitating the shape of a mouth using clasped hands, I brought forth a few silly twangs. I played a tune. It was meant to be 'Happy Birthday' but when it went wrong, the Hymn of the Republic took its place. In time, I placed it in the cot alongside his cherubic paws.

Later, I don't remember how, but I gravitated to Mary. The others were still occupied with the King of Kings. Weirdly, she wasn't rosy-cheeked or exhausted, or looking in any way as if she'd just birthed a child. Beneath her stormy-blue cloak, her belly hardly seemed to have deflated.

"What was that you gave to the boy?"

"I'm sorry Mrs …", I stumbled, "Joseph?"

She smiled. "Call me Mary. Let's not break character too much".

Intoning, " _'Break character'._ So you're just like the rest of us? What they call a robot?"

"No, but …I don't believe you can separate us nowadays. For all we know, you're as thoughtful or alive as anyone".

Maybe she sensed how easy it was to embarrass me, or make things seem overly liberal, soon moving on to other business.

"You gave the boy a musical instrument. That's clever. He's going to use up the frankincense and myrrh. When he grows up, he's going to give away the gold, what with being the most selfless man in the history of the world. But that little instrument he can keep. Maybe play for his disciples".

Now I laughed. "Our Lord playing a Jew harp. Surely it should be a regular harp?"

"You're a cowboy aren't you?"

Somehow she'd seen through me, stoopid hat and all.

"I was a ranger, out of Sweetwater. I have no idea what I'm doing here".

"I don't, either", shifting her weight uncomfortably. "This theme park is starting a new tradition, by all accounts. A pregnant lady is nominated to play the part of Mary during the nativity. My name was put forward by my prayer group. I reluctantly accepted. The whole business seems …different than I'd imagined".

Cringing my face like a typical Western stalwart. "I don't understand any this festival. Jesus lived an eventful life. Why aren't there much more important celebrations of, say, his feeding of the five-thousand, or the time he gave that fella an exorcism?"

She brooded, to the point where I felt flattered that she was giving so much thought to an idea put forward by a mere robot.

Black, tireless eyes set within a face that was perpetually clearing thirty, staring at you as if you were the pages of the most off-beat novel. A girl who used a minimum of make-up, but then again, the smoothness of her orangey flesh lending itself to the darkness of the stable.

She looked towards the glowing crib. "It's a moment of peace. Maybe the greatest moment of peace the world ever knew. For all Joseph, Mary and the Wise Men knew, baby Jesus would grow up and never face any resistance".

"I've been thinking of sticking around", I tapped the side of my head. "I spent my whole life around guns. Up here, I'm pretty sure I've got the know-how to craft a revolver from scratch -if you gave me a good enough blacksmith and some potassium. I'm not saying Jesus would be crazy about having a bodyguard, but …am I talking crazy?"

"You're not", she promised. "He would understand. Guns are comforting, and everyone needs comfort every now and again. I have a story about an antique gun. Would you like to hear it?"

Of course I would. I listened intently. She clutched her pregnant belly as she spoke.

"My grandfather owned a farm. I remember one Christmas, while my brother was put in charge of peeling tatos and making gravy, I got a different job. Excitedly –he couldn't help smiling—he brandished this huge antique blunderbuss, forced it into my hands. It was some kind of Victorian shotgun, just a long, polished musket with a flintlock catch I could barely fit my thumb over. 'Take Tasker' –that was his dog—'go and kill the turkey'.

"As an extra layer of humour, he dressed me up in a fur-lined hunting cagoule. I couldn't make sense of the sound when I walked, whether it was my boots in the snow, or the hugeness of my clothes ruffling around, or just my heartbeat bouncing around in my eardrums.

"I didn't feel bad about shooting the turkey. The trouble is, neither did Tasker. He sensed the excitement, and barked, and bounded around. The turkey's pen was a crazy distance from my grandad's back door. As I got near, completely ready, Tasker's noise made this bird jump clean over the border.

"He shot away over the open ground, no kind of escape route, just doing a zig-zag. We chased him over the mineral rocks, a little way over the marshy banks by the trees. He made that 'gabbling' noise they always make. Tasker barked like crazy –that didn't distract me from standing completely still in the freezing air, taking aim and firing.

"The turkey gave a little bound into the air as I hit him.

"Running to get him, we saw the craziest thing. He'd somehow flown slightly, then gone completely underwater, sinking to about two feet beneath the crystal clear water. He lay there with his wings spread on this bed of brown and red minerals, little flecks of sarandite. The water was like a magnifying glass. It was clearer than clear, and surreal –this ultimate land mammal laying where only fish or ducks could go. We were seeing something strange. The flowing water overhead looked like etched glass, only etched better than any regular human sculptor could manage.

"And I just thought, there will never be a moment in my life anywhere near as clear as this. Until maybe the time comes for me to explain it to someone. Does that sound crazy?"

It didn't sound crazy. I stood easy next to Mary and thought the matter over.


End file.
